Your Power Bill Climbs Through 2027. You Won't Use a Single Extra Kilowatt-Hour.

Update, October 24, 2026: The EIA refreshed its outlook on October 6, and the numbers below now use it: 18.68 cents in 2027 instead of 18.59. Actual prices are in too. The Electric Power Monthly released October 23 puts the U.S. residential average at 18.19 cents for January through August, up 6.8% from a year earlier. States split even inside one region. New England as a whole is flat, yet New Hampshire is up 15.0% and Connecticut is down 9.1% to 27.47 cents, the only state that fell by more than a rounding error. Ohio and Virginia are up 13.0%, Maryland 12.6%. Ohio’s solar math got better this year. Connecticut’s got worse. (2026 figures are preliminary.)

You are not using more electricity. You are paying more for the same electricity.

That is the entire story of your power bill between now and 2027, and the federal government just put numbers on it.

The Energy Information Administration publishes its Short-Term Energy Outlook every month. The U.S. average residential price was 17.30 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025. The October 6 forecast puts it at 18.21 cents this year and 18.68 cents in 2027.

Now the part nobody quotes. In the same tables, average residential usage per customer runs 10,479 kWh in 2025, 10,587 in 2026 after a hot summer, and 10,475 in 2027. Right back where it started.

Do the arithmetic on the average household. About $1,813 a year in 2025. About $1,957 in 2027. You pay roughly $144 more for 4 fewer kilowatt-hours.

That’s a price increase wearing a utility bill as a costume.

Here’s where it gets useful, because the national number is a blend and you don’t live in a blend. Middle Atlantic customers, meaning New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, go from 22.70 cents to 25.56 cents by 2027. That’s up 12.6%. East North Central, meaning Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, goes from 17.70 to 19.98 cents, up 12.9%.

New England? Up 3.6%. West North Central, the Plains states, up 4.3%.

So the fastest increases are not landing on the expensive coasts. They’re landing on the Mid-Atlantic and the industrial Midwest, two regions where rooftop solar has never been the obvious move because the rates were middling.

Middling rates are what’s changing.

This matters because solar payback runs on one input above all others: the price of the power you stop buying. Not the size of the array, not the brochure, not the 25-year savings total on page nine. The cents per kilowatt-hour you avoid. An Ohio homeowner looking at a quote that pencils at 17.70 cents is looking at stale math if the same kilowatt-hour is headed to 19.98.

And watch for the inverse mistake. A quote that assumes your household will burn more power every year is sizing an array for a home you don’t have. The federal forecast says average usage goes nowhere. If a salesperson builds consumption growth into the model to make the system look better, make them show you why yours grows when the national number doesn’t.

Rooftop output keeps climbing through all of this. The same outlook has residential small-scale solar generation going from 63 billion kWh in 2025 to 70 this year to 75 in 2027, up about 19% in two years.

Do this before you take another solar call. Pull your last twelve electric bills. Add up the dollars, add up the kilowatt-hours, divide. That quotient is your real rate, taxes and fixed charges and all, and it is almost never the number on the utility’s rate card.

Then run it. Our solar calculator takes your actual rate and your actual usage instead of a regional average, and the rest of our solar coverage is there when you want the financing side. If you already have a quote in hand, make them re-run it at your number and show you both versions.

Your rate is going up. Whether that makes solar worth it is still your call, and it is a different call in Toledo than it is in Hartford.

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